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Doing Philosophy in a Messy World by Asking Inconvenient Questions

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Doing Philosophy in a Messy World by Asking Inconvenient Questions prof.dr. C. Dutilh Novaes THE HUMAN FACTOR: DOING PHILOSOPHY IN A MESSY WORLD BY ASKING INCONVENIENT QUESTIONS VUA-242010-nl-NL-0519-1 1 14-05-2019 12:42:52 prof.dr. C. Dutilh Novaes THE HUMAN FACTOR: DOING PHILOSOPHY IN A MESSY WORLD BY ASKING INCONVENIENT QUESTIONS Rede uitgesproken bij de aanvaarding van het ambt van hoogleraar VU-University Research Chair Reasoning and Argumentation and their History, aan de Faculteit der Geesteswetenschappen van de Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam op 17 mei 2019. VUA-242010-nl-NL-0519-1 3 14-05-2019 12:42:52 The Human Factor: doing philosophy in a messy world by asking inconvenient questions 1. Introduction When she was about 7 years old, my daughter Marie liked to read very short informative books called ‘informatieboekjes’, which she borrowed from the library. These were age- appropriate short introductions to all kinds of topics, which she read avidly. (I was quite surprised when she came home with one on juvenile detention centers, but she assured me it was very interesting.) Inevitably, at some point she found the ‘informatieboekje’ on philosophy, and so she could finally learn more about that thing that kept her mother so busy. After she read the book, the following conversation ensued: -“So Marie, what is philosophy?” -“Philosophy is about asking lots of questions, and when you get answers you ask even more questions.” (Touché…) -“And what else did you learn in the book?” -“There was also the story of a man in Greece who walked around asking everyone all kinds of questions, and eventually people got angry at him and he had to die.” inconvenient So you see, asking questions can be dangerous, especially if they are questions. Good philosophical questions are always inconvenient, as they are meant to unsettle. Indeed, the same ‘informatieboekje’ has a definition of philosophy that I still use when I give lectures to prospective students: “Filosoferen is vragen stellen bij dingen die gewoon lijken, maar die eigenlijk helemaal niet zo vanzelfsprekend zijn.” “To philosophize is to ask questions about things that seem normal, but which are actually not obvious at all.” Philosophical questions are meant to dislodge and defy common sense; they force us to see the non-obvious in what appears unproblematic. We think we know what time is, but do we really? How come I am the same person now as I was 10 years ago (presumably!), given that all the molecules that composed me then have now been replaced by different ones? Can we be sure that we are not living in the Matrix? No wonder that Socrates, the irritating gadfly, ended up irking the good people of Athens: philosophy is at heart a subversive enterprise. 2. Paradoxes paradoxes Some of the most powerful tools at the philosopher’s disposal to expose the non- para doxa obviousness of what superficially seems straightforward are argument. Etymologically, a paradox is what is distinct from ( ) common opinion ( ). But the philosophically more interesting way to define a paradox in my opinion is as an where the premises seem acceptable (true), the reasoning from premises to conclusion seems acceptable (correct), and yet the conclusion seems unacceptable (false). But how can this 1 be? Something must be amiss somewhere! The typical attitude of philosophers when confronted with paradoxes is well captured in the following passage by philosopher M. Sainsbury: Appearances have to deceive, since the acceptable cannot lead by acceptable steps to the unacceptable. So, generally, we have a choice: either the conclusion is not really unacceptable, or else the starting point, or the reasoning, has some non-obvious flaw. In other words, when we encounter a paradox, this is usually interpreted as a sign that something has to go, and there are three main options: one of the premises is not acceptable (true) after all; one of the steps in the reasoning is not acceptable (correct) after all; the is conclusion is not unacceptable (false) after all. (A fourth option, which horrifies most philosophers, is that it possible for the acceptable to lead to the unacceptable by acceptable steps. This possibility would entail that discursive rationality is not a reliable guide to draw sound conclusions, a scary thought indeed. But there have been thinkers who recognized and even embraced the folly of discursive rationality.) No matter which way we go given these three options, we are forced to revise at least some of the beliefs and opinions we entertained so far: despite initial appearances, maybe one of the premises is false after all; or maybe the reasoning is not correct after all; or maybe (and this tends to be the least popular but also most the exciting option) the conclusion is not that crazy after all. Either way, a paradox shows that three of our beliefs (that the premises are true, that the reasoning is correct, that the conclusion is false) are mutually incompatible, and forces us to make choices in order to restore peace. Notice that the mutually inconsistent beliefs were there all along, doing no harm, but once the paradox brings the inconsistency to the fore, some cognitive reorganization is required. The principle of minimal effort dictates that the revision should be as minimal as possible, and indeed philosophers often discuss which of the three options would do the least ‘damage’, the presupposition being that the least revisionist option is to be preferred. But sometimes, paradoxes can lead to startling discoveries. By embracing the implausible conclusion of Galileo’s paradox—that the collection of all natural numbers is of the same size (has the same cardinality, to use the right jargon) as the collection of all perfect square numbers—the mathematician Georg Cantor created (or discovered, as the jury is still out on the ontological status of mathematical entities) a whole new mathematical world, that of the transfinite numbers, and thus inaugurated set theory. More recently, a number of philosophers have argued that the Liar paradox—is the sentence ‘This sentence is not true’ true or false?—shows that some sentences can be both true and false, unsettling millennia of Aristotelian orthodoxy (but embracing a worldview presented by the Buddhist 2 nd rd philosopher Nagarjuna in the 2 and 3 centuries AD). These strange, disconcerting ideas again show us that many things are not nearly as simple as they seem. Paradoxes can also be a lot of fun. The grandfather paradox, for example, where a time- traveller goes back to the past to kill his grandfather, is a great conversation piece for dinner parties, aside from raising deeper questions about the nature of time. When she was 7 years old (which is apparently peak age for wisdom, at least for my children), my daughter Sophie came up with a paradox of her own. The starting point is what in Dutch is known as the ‘upside down world game’ (omgekeerde wereld) and in English goes by ‘opposite day game’. The game basically functions as a truth-value flipping operator: if you say yes, you mean no, and if you say no, you mean yes. Sophie then noted that if someone not asks you ‘are you playing upside down world?’, all kinds of strange things happen to each of are the answers you may give. If you are playing upside down world, you will say no; but if you playing upside down world you will also say no. So the ‘no’ answer is not informative, but still coherent. As for the ‘yes’ answer, if you are playing upside down world and say ‘yes’, then that means ‘no’, and so you are not playing the game after all. But then your ‘yes’ was a genuine yes in the first place, and so you are playing the game and said yes, which takes us back to the beginning. Still with me? Probably not… Never mind! Sophie’s own assessment of the situation was that the question ‘are you playing upside down world?’, which is prima facie perfectly normal and innocent, turns out to be a really difficult, if not impossible, question to answer. Who would have thought? 3. Philosophy as situated and social Let us go back to philosophy being about asking lots of questions. The focus on questions highlights another fundamental feature of doing philosophy (and in fact arguably of any intellectual enterprise): philosophy is essentially a collective, social endeavor. Asking questions and offering answers is obviously quintessentially a dialogical practice; though one can of course engage in solitary thinking, this is arguably the internalization (to use a terminology introduced by the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky) of a social practice initially learned in the public sphere. This too is an old idea, again going back at least to Plato’s notion of thought as inner speech, and more recently developed in detail by cognitive linguists under the concept of ‘fictive interaction’. It entails that, while it is of course possible to philosophize on your own, like Descartes by his fireplace, solitary philosophizing is not paradigmatic. But one need not go as far as Socrates, who was suspicious of all forms of writing, and conclude that true thinking could only happen by means of actual dialogical interactions, involving physical participants. Dialogue can also occur through other media, writing in particular (which, in the day and age of whatsapp and social media, is almost a trivial observation). Indeed, the very history of philosophy across the centuries can be viewed as 3 different authors engaging in dialogues with their contemporaries as well as with philosophers of the past through their writings. However, for those of us who in fact like to talk, there’s no better way to do philosophy than to engage in actual conversations, be they in the classroom with students, at seminars with colleagues, or informally with philosophically inclined friends.
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